Developers’ corner

The EU Open Data Portal (EU ODP) aims to encourage the use of EU datasets for building third-party applications. To help achieve this, two programming interfaces are proposed to developers.

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REST API access

One way to access the EU ODP is to use the REST API. All of the portal core functionalities are available through the application programming interface (API), which encompasses all you can do with the web interface and more. The information retrieved can thus be used by an external code that calls the portal API.

Most programming languages can be used to query the API as long as there is a compatible HTTP connection component, such as Jersey for Java.

Dedicated tools

Some specialised tools have been developed and can be used to facilitate the use of the REST API. All of these clients are available on Github and can be forked to develop custom solutions in the mentioned programming languages.

You can find specifications of SPARQL on the W3C web site: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/. The models used to describe datasets catalogued on the EU ODP are described on the ‘Linked data’ page under ‘Metadata vocabulary’.